'A superb book ... Anybody interested in Scottish history needs to read it' Andrew Marr, Sunday TimesEighteenth-century Scotland is famed for generating many of the enlightened ideas which helped to shape the modern world. But there was in the same period another side to the history of the nation. Many of Scotland's people were subjected to coercive and sometimes violent change, as traditional ways of life were overturned by the 'rational' exploitation of land use. The Scottish Clearances is a superb and highly original account of this sometimes terrible process, which changed the Lowland countryside forever, as it also did, more infamously, the old society of the Highlands.

Based on a vast array of original sources, this pioneering book is the first to chart this tumultuous saga in one volume, with due attention to evictions and loss of land in both north and south of the Highland line. In the process, old myths are exploded and familiar assumptions undermined. With many fascinating details and the sense of an epic human story, The Scottish Clearances is an evocative memorial to all whose lives were irreparably changed in the interests of economic efficiency.

This is a story of forced clearance, of the destruction of entire communities and of large-scale emigration. Some winners were able to adapt and exploit the new opportunities, but there were also others who lost everything. The clearances created the landscape of Scotland today, but it came at a huge price.

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If Sir Tom Devine hadn't chosen to be a historian, he'd have made a great historical novelist. That choice may have been a loss to literature, but The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed, is worth it. The scope of this book - the Lowlands, the Highlands and the diaspora from the 17th century to the 20th - is impressive, and the detail and depth of knowledge displayed are remarkable - but what's truly amazing about it is how damn readable it is. (Diana Gabaldon Telegraph)

At the end of this superb book, a much more nuanced picture emerges of what might be called the great demographic revolution of Scotland. (David Aaronovitch The Times)

About the Author

T. M. Devine has written four books for Penguin: The Scottish Nation, Scotland's Empire, To the Ends of the Earth and Independence or Union. He is Sir William Fraser Professor Emeritus of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh. In 2001 he was awarded the Royal Gold Medal, Scotland's supreme academic accolade, and has won all three major prizes for Scottish historical research. He was knighted in 2014 for services to the study of Scottish history. In 2018 he received the UK Parliament's All Party History and Archives Group Lifetime Achievement Award for Historical Studies.

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TM Devine says in his conclusion how writers, from Alexander Mackenzie in his 1886 “History of the Highland Clearances” to John Prebble in “The Highland Clearances” have “opted for the single explanation of human wickedness” – a famed warrior race betrayed by its leaders whose greed and lust for riches led to empty glens populated by sheep. The truth, as explained in this outstanding book, is infinitely more complicated. Surprising facts: Highland populations continued to rise during the age of the Clearances, landlords strenuously opposed emigration in the late 18th-early 19th centuries, and from the end of the Seven Years War onwards emigration for many was a positive choice. This book is a powerful social and agrarian history of Scotland from the seventeenth century, and as the title suggests is not limited to the Highlands. Indeed, the central third of the book gives a detailed account of the clearances in the Lowlands and Borders which have been little examined by historians.

The first section deals with the “Long death of clanship” from James VI/I onwards. The odds were stacked against the Highlands agriculturally – with only 9% in cultivation and good only for raising black cattle too valuable for the people to eat, the poverty of the region was one reason it took the Scottish state so long to gain control over it – it wasn’t worth it. Clan-based society was undermined by acquisition, crown charters and intermarriage, while more and more clan gentry pursued expensive lifestyles in the capital which the incomes from their poverty-stricken estates couldn’t support. The Napoleonic Wars provided some relief with the demands they created for beef, men and kelp (for chemicals). By the mid-19th century two thirds of Highland estates had changed hands following the bankruptcies of their traditional owners. Edinburgh lawyers acting for the new owners were unsympathetic to the plight of their tenants.

Two generations before the Highland Clearances, the Lowlands underwent a clearance which resulted in the disappearance within a few decades of an entire social class, the cottars. But this went with a rapid expansion of towns and villages, and new economic activities which meant leaving the land was a positive choice. Between the 1871 and 1911 censuses the trickle leaving the Lowlands countryside became a flood, “caused not by destitution but by the lure of opportunity”. Protest against enclosures took place in Galloway, but most protest was around religious, not agricultural, matters.

The background to the clearances in the Highlands was a rapid and sustained population increase, a fact ignored by Prebble and his ilk. And, unlike in the Lowlands, the population stayed put – they moved to overcrowded, tiny holdings and to the coast, where they were expected to take up fishing, kelp gathering and whisky distilling. The potato came to the rescue until the potato famine of the 1840s added a new level of misery. Crofting was a new system. The recruitment of Highland regiments (with recruitment bonuses for landlords) provided some relief in the late 18th century, but this reached its limits.

Villains – the Countess of Sutherland, of course, and her agent Patrick Sellar, “whose name lived on in infamy”. Devine explores the racial overtones of the Clearances – the view of the Gael as an inferior race, and the role of CM Trevelyan who saw mass, forced emigration, to rid the Highlands of Gaels, as the only answer. For a while the Scottish press supported the landlords, but in the final chapters he explores how the tide turned in the 1880s with the Highland Land Law Reform Association, the Napier Commission, the 1886 Crofters’ Holdings (Scotland) Act, and the vilification of the landlords in the press – and in Alexander Mackenzie’s book.

Just one thing: coming from a long line of MacDonells of Glengarry I couldn’t help noticing a cluster of related editing mistakes: “Macdonnel of Glengarry” has three page references in the index, and a further three mentions (not picked up in the index) on pages 53, 226 and 271 where the name appears as MacDonnell of Glengarry. Both are incorrect: it’s MacDonell of Glengarry (one n, 2 l’s). On the facing page to the last one (270), it’s spelt Macdonnel (as per the index), so it’s surprising this wasn’t picked up at the proof-reading stage. And I’m not sure who the “Alexander Macdonnell” mentioned on page 264 as “warning out” some tenants from his Knoydart estates is? Not the 15th chief (Walter Scott’s friend Alastair Ranaldson, whose portrait by Raeburn hangs in the Scotttish National Gallery), nor his predecessor (Duncan), nor his successor (Aeneas). The official clan history, “The Clan Ranald of Knoydart and Glengarry” by Norman H MacDonald, discusses the name and includes an appendix of facsimiles of chiefs’ signatures from the 16th century onwards. Aeneas, 9th Chief (1645-1680) was the first to sign himself “Macdonell”, as all have done since, some opting for the upper case “D”. “MacDonnell” (two n’s) is the name of the Co. Antrim branch of Clan Donald.

Professor Devine writes with clarity. I found the book interesting and also enjoyable to read. I have always found Scottish history fascinating and purchased the book purely out of interest as I was aware that it put a new slant on previous ideas on the Highland Clearances by, in addition, introducing the concept of Lowland clearances. I would recommend this book to any person who wants to find out more about the inheritance of our country.

As an antidote to Prebble this is excellent; but the style is gently repetitious; points made keep re-emerging, often even on the same page. It needed a tough editor and the book could have been shorter and better focused. But well worth reading nonetheless.

Quite a difficult read for me because although extremely interesting and informative Tam Devine is an academic and I am just very interested in history, especially Scottish history. Well worth persevering and as a reference book will prove invaluable.

For me, an excellent overview of the Highland Clearances in context of the period's drive to agricultural improvement, societal changes and overseas expansion and colonies, and the reasons for the differences in perceptions of depopulation between the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland, and some contextualisation. Thoroughly readable history.

Although my A-Level history period was the 18th and 19th centuries, English schools (and the exam) didn’t require any more than dealing with that pesky Pretender, implying that after Culloden all was sweetness and light. Therefore most of my prior knowledge of the Clearances comes from John Prebble’s book, which many consider partisan.

The blurb describes Devine as the “greatest living historian” of Scottish history, and from his CV this seems a reasonable claim. As he says in the Introduction, he has covered parts of the topic in other books, but aims here to pull it all together.

There are two common errors about the Clearances which Devine highlights at the start: that they are associated only with the Highlands (thus the title, “Scottish” instead of “Highland”), and that they were the overwhelming and direct cause of the depopulation of and emigration from the Highlands. Devine succeeds in both of these:

-He contends “the dispossession of people in the Highlands has always had a high profile; in the Lowlands it is low to the point of virtual non-existence”. To drive the point home, he says that the 19th century evictions in the Highlands “left a deep mark and their memory endured”, “while most of those that had gone before were lost to history”.and that landlessness became greater in the Lowlands. He explains that, in the Lowlands, despite a comparable level of landlessness, its people adopted more easily to a wage-based economy, partly because of a higher demand for agricultural labour. However, he mentions many side-effects of this, for example that Lowlands women “became a significant part of the workforce because the heavy industries … drew off so many men to jobs in the cities”.

-As for the Highlands, he argues, from 1745 to about 1820 most emigration was voluntary, motivated by a desire to gain land which had been lost due to over-population and the start of the enclosure process. The Government was resistant to emigration, because of the need for labour for profitable work such as kelping and the wish to retain a pool of men for army recruitment. By 1850 this view was reversed, and instead “mass emigration, including, if warranted, the use of coercion, was the only corrective for the deep-seated social ills of the Highlands”, caused by such factors as poverty, illness and the potato famine. Thus “the policy of clearance changed from resettlement to expulsion”.

Many other historians have expounded upon the evils of the Highland Clearances, but Devine helps us to see events from different viewpoints. For example, it is fairly well-known that the re-settlement of inland Highlanders to the east coast with small holdings sufficient “for the maintenance of an industrious family” but also “pinched enough” to force crofters to take up fishing as well [quotations from an estate manager of the time]. Devine points out this means that many men were forced into an occupation for which they had no experience.

One of the many strands he covers is the relative lack of opposition to the clearances, and the differing causes of this in the Highlands and Lowlands. He correctly identifies as a landmark the start of organised opposition in Skye in the 1880s, which helped to lead to laws improving crofters’ rights.

An essential source for a comprehensive picture of why and how the clearances happened and what changes they produced.